Pity
by Zeda
Summary: Integra refuses to give up her sense of dignity and strength, even in the face of her own demise. (rather short vignette, Integra POV)


Title: Pity  
  
Author: Zeda (BLK)  
  
Started: April 5th, 2003 Ended: April 5th, 2003  
  
Series: Hellsing  
  
Rating: R  
  
Warnings: Very sad and slow, may be depressing.  
  
Summary: Integra is dying slowly, and she refuses to lose her air of strength even in the face of her own demise.  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own Hellsing, not any bit of it. I'm just making fanfiction . . .  
  
Comments go to Zeda at Bkoe101725@aol.com  
  
MY SITE: http://www.geocities.com/zeda_chan  
  
*  
  
There's not terribly much that I can say to explain myself.  
  
When I think of all of the things I have and haven't accomplished in my life, of all the promises unkept, I can feel the sorrow and guilt welling inside of me, cutting into the pink inner walls of my soul and infecting, aching and festering slowly, like a black murky pain within me that can only continue to grow. But I've never awknowledged that slow rotting inside of my spiritual being . . . and it seems now that the sickness has seeded in my physical body as well.  
  
Cancer. Quite simply, I am being eaten apart from the inside out. The psychological pain of life may be endured silently, but physical illness is much easier to see in me, nomatter how tightly I cocoon myself in yards and yards of nondescript fabric. They can see how I have trouble breathing and how I become nauseous at every step. They see my naturally dark complexion growing pale and sickly in tone. I have never been a vain woman, but I hope that the treatments don't make my hair fall out, at least not all of it . . . because then they would all notice, and the status I have fought and clawed and bled to achieve amongst them will falter, and they will pity me.  
  
I hate pity. I don't want it at all . . . To be pitied is to be a weak, waifish thing; easily victimized. I am not a victim. I am most certainly not weak . . .   
  
Just because I am dying. That's no reason to pity me.  
  
Walter seems as if he cannot decide between his grief and his faith in me to survive. I know that he has every confidence in my ability to combat this dread inner sickness, but he has lived through the deaths of many he held dear, and such experience has given him a kind of uneasy pain as of my diagnosis. Sometimes, while I rest in my bed after a new series, fatigued and aching and breating uneasily through my festering, dying lungs, he will stand beside my bedroom door and simply watch me. I wonder if he knows that this soft panting only partly describes the choking feeling I'm having, like hot thick blood is filling my lungs. It makes me feel weak, pitied . . . As much as I love Walter, like a dear friend or another father, I cannot excuse his sympathy for me. It is the cruelest thing he could do to me now . . . Stand by quietly and try to memorize my features, just in case . . .  
  
Just in case . . .  
  
Ceras seems to be confused with herself over me. I am but her master's master, and she knows as well as I that my death will free both of them, but this 'human virtue' as she calls it, this thing she cannot shrug off, keeps the pains of mortal grieving within her breast. She, the weak would-be No Life King that is more useless than an infant, watching me with worrying eyes as I walk with careful, metered steps to my office or to my meetings. I try so hard to veil my illness, so she cannot see that the soft steps only in part betray the burning agony surging inside of me. Her reddish eyes gleam with empathy, and I cannot stand it . . . I want none of that, perhaps least of all from her. To be pitied my a mentally weak creature . . . To have such a thing worry over my barely faltering steps and short, soft panting . . .  
  
I absolutely loathe it.  
  
And Alucard . . .  
  
Even Alucard has changed. And I hate that most of all, because he is the one I count on to never change; always to hate and berrate and sneer at me. Always to save me from unspecified perils and grin that nauseating grin of condescending arrogance at me. Always . . . always to remain unchanging: seeming young and frightening and seething and monstrous.  
  
Alucard was the first to note the change. It was as if he could scent the death in the air around me, in the air I breathed-out past my drying lips. As Walter confided in me, Alucard was the one who had come to him and suggested that I be taken to a doctor. At the beginning, right after my diagnosis, nothing changed in him. Still that taunting and sneering and teasing, just the same. Then, as it became that I could not walk so well, and that I was prone to long pauses in work of simply breathing softly, trying to get past a plume of agony inside of me . . . his taunts became infrequent, came to lack the bite of true sincerity. He didn't grin as often, and he began to lapse into quiet spells, watching me from the shadows. I could feel him watching me . . . I could feel red eyes on me, silent, unreadable.  
  
I have never feared anything in my life, not even death . . . I felt the first agonizing, rising horror of that fear when Incognito was draining me and Alucard appeared dead. I felt that freezing inferno in my blood, that adrenaline surge, that agony and sorrow and horror and overall, horrendous pain. That was the fear of death at the last moments, a cold empty terror . . .  
  
But, I know a greater, more painful fear than that. The only thing I fear anymore, now that my demise is more real than ever before . . .   
  
I fear that Alucard may pity me.  
  
I don't want pity . . . I despise it, from everyone . . .  
  
But I could not handle it if Alucard changed and came to pity me. In these cold, long, murky moments of pain as my body shivers and shudders and tries not to die, I think of the blood flowing in his veins as compared to the slowly dying Hellsing blood in my own. He is a horrible monster, a murderous demon, yes, I know I should think all of that, because it is undeniably true . . . But he has offered me a taste of his blood, and immortality. A chance to stand tall again as a No Life King, to be a fine monstrosity of the dark and stand at his side in eternity . . .  
  
That is his pity. That has always been his pity for me. He pities me . . . He pities my pathetic, slow human death; the death that he can smell hanging in the air around me like a cloud of thick black plague . . .  
  
I cannot handle that. I can endure all of this festering agony inside my body, but the sympathy of a monster . . . The sympathy of Alucard . . .  
  
It makes me feel weak, waifish, easily victimized. It makes me feel like I might really die this time. It makes me feel this indescribable agony inside . . . An agony I refuse to impart to anyone; a slow sad pain that fills every ounce of my being, something I have never and will never share with anyone . . .  
  
But I call him to my deathbed and I tell him so.  
  
*  
  
End 


End file.
